Academic Papers: collaboration, writing & discovery

There were presentations from two interesting, freshly developed collaboration tools for researchers:

Paperhive – About having conversations about a paper, such that if you don’t understand something you can ask a question and someone else will answer it. It doesn’t create copies of papers but allows you to search for them and when you view the paper through their interface, you see the comments. Collaborative reading!

Authorea – Tool for co-authoring a paper, which apparently works with LATEX and Google docs and other formats besides. “puts emphasis on collaboration and structured, visual editing.” Collaborative writing!

Discussion at the meeting was interesting: it was led by Alex from Paperhive, who evoked the “spirit of open science”, i.e. collaboration and sharing. And we all did share: if you’re interested in such themes then take a look at Twitter conversations with the #openscience hashtag, as of course some folks tweeted at the event!

I chatted to fellow freelancers and to researchers including Franzi, who is involved in a citizen science project at Berlin’s Natural History Museum, and also Sebastian who works for an open access publisher – of great sounding digital books – Language Science Press.

I was left reflecting on how data sharing can be achieved, as opening access to papers is one thing, but opening your data and your whole science is another… being open at the beginning about methodologies can help people to join disparate studies together and share the same methodology to make the results of their research more powerful. But as ever, being open is just the start of the process because you also have to make yourself heard! What channels are there for doing this? And of course, we all of researchers who won’t release data because they want to get another 5 papers out of it themselves. Yet who can blame them in the publish or perish climate? What we measure and incentivise researchers for can have damaging effects, not least the salami slicing of research that would be far more meaningfully written up in a single paper, instead of across 6! How can we make open data itself the output? Well, such themes are big and not for me to worry about, thank goodness. Last week was also the LIBER conference in Helsinki and there the library mangers and repository and publishing folks were very busy discussing data related themes. Once again, Twitter gives a flavour of the kind of things discussed there.